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Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind 07/07/2014 12 08 AM imagination - Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind https:/ / sites.google.com/ site/ minddict/ imagination Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind Search this site H_Q|V|EAB_O_UILND_EXC_QNlRLBlJlQRSCQ_NIACLliSSJlEJV|AE imaginatiQn See page 6 for citation information and publication history. Traditionally, the mental capacity for experiencing, constructing, or manipulating 'rnental imagery’ (quasi-perceptual experience). Imagination is also regarded as responsible for fantasy, inventiveness, idiosyncrasy, and creative, original, and insightful thoughtin general, and, sometimes, fora much wider range ofmental activities dealing with the non-actual, such as supposing, pretending, ‘seeing as’, thinking ofpossib ilities, and even being mistaken. See representation. Navigating the Dictionary: There are different ways to Details: navigate the dictionary. You can use our search engine at Introduction the top of the page, the index located in the menu above, or Despite being a familiar word of everydaylanguage, imagination is a very complex, contested, browse entries alphabetically. and evaluativelyloaded concept. lt, like many cognate terms, often appears to have radically Alphabetical entries can be differentsenses and connotations when used in different contexts. Furthermore, although it accessed via the alphab eton plays onlya small overt role in mostcontemporarytheories ofthe mind, it has played a much the home page. more prominent part in the past. The conceptwill thus best be understood through its history. Ancient and Medieval Conception Other Resources: The concept ofthe imagination seems to have been first introduced into philosophy by - Stanford Encyclopedia of Aristotle, who tells us that "imagination [phantasia] is (apart from any metaphorical sense of Philosophy the word) the process bywhich we saythat an image [phantasma] is presented to us" (De Anima, 428a 1-4). It has been questioned in recenttimes whetherthe Greek words phantasia - Dictionary of Cognitive and phantasma are really equivalentto "imagination" and "(menta|) image" as heard in Science contemporary usage. However, there can be little doubt that, at least until very recenttimes, theoretical discussions ofphantasia, its Latin translation imaginatio, and their etymological - Philpapers descendants, continued to be rooted in the concepts introduced byAristotle and the problems arising from his rather elliptical explanation ofthem. Very arguablythis is true of all Western - Internet Encyclopedia of philosophical schools: Stoics, Epicureans and Neoplatonists quite as much as avowed Philosophy Aristoteleans; Muslims as much as Christians; and, come to that, Empiricists quite as much as Rationalists. - Phi/job s: Job s in Philosophy According to Aristotle "The soul never thinks without a mental image [phantasma]" (De Anima, 431a 15-20). ltwould appearthat, for him (and, again, for mostofsuccessors, until very recently), such images played something like the role that is played in contemporary cognitive theory by "mental representations". In this tradition, imagery, and thus imagination, has an essential role to playin all forms ofthinking (with the possible exception ofdirect intuitions of Platonic forms, or ofthe divine). It has no special connection with inventiveness or creativity. tdoes, however, have a special connection with desire. Aristotle argues that our desire for (and, thus, pursuitof) anything notactually presentto the senses must be mediated by an 'mage ofthe desired object. Aristotle's treatment is morally neutral, but his notion ofdesirous 'magination maylater have become conflated with the Hebraic concept of yetser, the willful (but also semi-divine) faculty in humanitythat led to Adam's (and, indeed, all subsequent) sin. Atany rate, in the Judaeo-Christian intellectual tradition (from ancientto relatively recenttimes) 'magination, although recognized as indispensable to cognition, was usually profoundly distrusted. Unless strictly disciplined by reason itwould soon lead us into concupiscence and sin. But, of course, the connection between imagination and perception is the more fundamental. Aristotle's conception ofphantasia/imagination seems to be closely bound up with his 1of6 07/07/2014 12 08 AM imagination - Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind https:/ / sites.google.com/ site/ minddict/ imagination postulation ofwhat came to be called the "common sense" or sensus communis. This is the part of the psyche responsible forthe binding of the deliverances ofthe individual sense organs into a coherent and intelligible representation, and for apprehending the so called "common sensibles", those aspects ofthe world (broadly, the spatio-temporal aspects) that can be known through more than one sense mode without being the characteristic proper object ofany ofthem (Aristotelian common sensibles are broadly coextensive with Lockean "primary qualities"). In fact, it is plausible to interpret phantasia and sensus communis as different aspects or modes ofa single faculty, depending on whether it is regarded as receptive or productive, or on whether it is operating in the presence orthe absence of whatever is being mentally represented. Phantasmata are generated in either case, butwhen their immediate cause is an objectdirectly before us the tendencyis to referto them as percepts, and to the process as perception; when memoryof previouslyobserved things is the source, reference will more likely be to imageryand imagination. Thus imagination came to be particularly associated with thinking about things that are not actually currently present to the senses: things thatare not reallythere. Some ofAristotle's successors tended to laythe stress on the conceptual separation ofthe notions ofimagination and sensus communis. Thus Early Christian and Medieval anatomists often located sensus communis at the frontofthe brain's firstventricle, readyto receive sense impressions, whereas imagination was placed at the rear ofthis ventricle (or even in the second ventricle), and was responsible for holding and perhaps consolidating the resultant images, and passing them back to the other ventricles and faculties (where they could be used in thoughtor stored in memory). Imagination mightalso, sometimes, be held responsible forthe recombining ofvarious image parts into chimerical forms. This lattertype ofprocess would allow the individual mind a degree offreedom and a scope for idiosyncracythatwould hardly have been available from the othertraditional faculties, constrained as theywere by reality and the laws oflogic. It would also, of course, give rise to images even more removed from presentactualitythan images retrieved intact from memory, and thus even more quintessentiallyimaginary In this vein, we sometimes find modern writers making a distinction between "memoryimagery" and "imagination imagery", or even restricting the use of "imagination" (and, a fortiori, "imaginary") to thoughts aboutthings that have never (or never yet) been actually experienced. (For some reason, words derived from the original Greek term, such as "fantasy", "fancy", or "phantasm", seem to have come to connote unrealityeven more stronglythan "imagination" and its cognates. It is worth noting thatsome medieval authors, finding both the Greek and the Latin terms available, did attempt to draw functional and anatomical distinctions between imaginatio and phantasia, but no clear consensus on how this distinction was to be drawn is apparent, and these attempts seem unlikelyto have significantlyinfluenced more recent usages.) Modern Usage Other ancient and medieval authors, however, were more inclined to stress the underlying identity ofthe imagination and the common sense, and this interpretation probably became more widespread with the increased availability of more accurate Aristotelian texts and translations in the later middle ages and renaissance. We find this tendency even in such a consciously anti-Aristotelian figure as Descartes, who, in the Treatise on Man, explicitly identifies both the sensus communis and the imagination with the surface ofthe pineal gland, upon which images (ldeés) both ofsense and ofmemory orfancy are inscribed. Although it is important not to confuse these "corporeal ideas" with the "clear and distinct ideas" that play so prominent a part in Descartes‘ epistemology, it is surely not coincidental that the site of the Cartesian imagination/sensus communis, the pineal surface, is also the privileged site of mind-bodyinteraction, the lynchpin that holds togetherthe two metaphysical worlds of Cartesianism. As it had done for Aristotle, the imagination/sensus communis mediated between the bodily senses, and the (now incorporeal) rational mind. Afterthe conceptual revolutions of the 17th centurythe Aristotelian concept of sensus communis largely disappeared from philosophical discussion, and, inasmuch as the functions that had been ascribed to itwere considered ofinterest, theywere likelyto be directly ascribed to imagination. In the Em piricisttradition, images, underthe rubric of "ideas", came more than everto be seen as the preeminent, even the only, form ofmental content. Hume, indeed, frequently uses "imagination" as a virtual synonym for "mind". This is reasonable enough inasmuch as he regards the mind as no more than a bundle ofimages (impressions 2 of 6 07/07/2014 12 08 AM imagination - Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind https:/ / sites.google.com/ site/ minddict/ imagination and ideas), and cognition as a matter oftheir vicissitudes and associative interactions. But even for Hume, imagination
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